Tag: conspiracy

It’s truly fascinating to see how the Official Shakespeare Story necessarily involves all sorts of conspiracy theories and ignoring nearly all the actual evidence of the documented works, while the so-called “conspiracy theory” that Shakespeare was a lesser author who plagiarized Lord Thomas North is based in rock-solid evidence of every kind, from eyewitness observation to AI literary analysis:

We now know that Shakespeare penned lesser, collaborative works and inferior stage-renditions (i.e., the bad quartos) of the literary masterpieces because that is what all documentation—all relevant title pages printed while he was alive and within a few years of his death—explicitly declared. Moreover, as we shall show now, that is clearly what many of his fellow writers knew to be the case, with Robert Greene and Ben Jonson even deriding Shakespeare’s method of close adaptation as plagiarism. Incredibly, my one goal on this substack is to confirm that all relevant Shakespeare-era documents are accurate; that there were no devious, behind-the-scenes plots; that all the recorded observations and comments about the Stratford dramatist are factual; that large groups of playwrights, printers, and publishers were not concocting, wide-ranging, multi-decade schemes meant to fool future generations of researchers. Incredibly, and despite the significant amount of controversy that this will generate, I am merely urging readers, again and again, and accept what the title pages state and what his friends and rivals wrote about him. All you have to do is just believe your eyes.

The very first reference to Shakespeare in London as an “upstart crow, beautified” with the feathers of other writers evokes Horace’s description of a plagiarist as a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds

The first widely accepted literary allusion to Shakespeare appeared in the 1592 satirical pamphlet, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, allegedly written by the playwright Robert Greene. It described the playwright as an upstart crow beautified with the feathers of other writers. Upstart refers to his sudden success, achieving wealth and power as a young man, and the tale of the crow that had been beautified with the feathers of other birds alluded to Horace’s classical allegory of plagiarism. The Roman poet compared a plagiarist to a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds. As New Cambridge editor J. Dover Wilson wrote about this passage, the pamphlet “was accusing Shakespeare of stealing and adapting plays upon Henry VI.” Similarly, Peter Berek agreed that the “‘upstart crow’ passage is accusing Shakespeare of being a plagiarist who takes credit for the work of other writers.”

Importantly, we have no examples of such accusations of plagiarism being hurled at any other prominent writers of the era. Indeed, we don’t even have any comments about Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont, John Fletcher, etc., that can even be confused as an allegation of plagiarism.

Ben Jonson lampoons Shakespeare as an ignorant country bumpkin
As is conventional, Ben Jonson spoofs Shakespeare in his satire Every Man Out of His Humor (1600), parodying the successful dramatist as the newly wealthy, satin-clad, uneducated, social-climbing rustic Sogliardo. Sogliardo aggressively pursues a higher social rank and purchases his coat of arms with the crest “Not without mustard”. As scholars note, Shakespeare’s social aspirations were well known, and he had recently obtained a coat of arms with the crest “Not without right.” In substituting “mustard” for “right,” Jonson probably took his cue from the “mustard scene” in The Taming of the Shrew, in which the clown, Grumio, attempting to starve Katherina, refuses to serve her beef without mustard.

H. N. Gibson, noting the similarity of the crests and the fact that “Shakespeare did aspire to gentility,” writes that “there can be little doubt that Shakespeare was one of [Jonson’s] victims in Every Man Out of His Humour.” James P. Bednarz agrees that Sogliardo is a caricature of Shakespeare, writing that Jonson was mocking Shakespeare’s “outlandish aspiration to gentility.” Katherine Duncan-Jones may have been succumbing to Stratfordolatry when she contended that “Sogliardo, a country bumpkin of manifest stupidity, could not possibly be construed as a portrait of Shakespeare,” yet she agrees that it is “impossible not to find a Shakespearean reference” in the arms, referring to it as Jonson’s “mockery” of “Shakespeare’s pursuit of gentility.”

It’s also informative to note that when modern scholars are presented with the evidence of Shakespeare’s actual writing, correctly attributed to him, they reject it because they recognize that it can’t possibly be written by the author of the works he plagiarized.

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Yes, we should have known. Ben Jonson was openly telling everyone who wrote all along, right at the front of the First Folio, that it was Lord Thomas North, the translator, among many other works, of Plutarch’s Lives.

In 1623, Ben Johnson wrote one of the most famous odes one poet ever crafted for another—To the Memory of My Beloved the author Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us. The poem was prominently placed at the beginning of the first official collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio. Yet some eight years later, the poet Leonard Digges wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jonson’s ode, denouncing it as an attack against Shakespeare. He was so furious that he wanted Jonson’s supposedly abusive poem removed for the publication of the Second Folio (1632)—and replaced with Digges’s own defense of the Stratford playwright, answering Jonson’s insults “point by point.” In 1693, the renowned Shakespeare enthusiast John Dryden responded similarly to Digges, labeling Jonson’s poem as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.” And Brian Vickers has noted that Dryden’s “judgment has been echoed many times.”

But no one has been able to explain what was so insolent and invidious about the poem—until now. As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle. And, at the end of this article, you are almost certainly going to be asking yourself the same question I think about daily: HOW ON EARTH DID EVERYONE MISS THIS?

Jonson.. is saying when we turn from tragedy to Shakespeare’s comedies, the great tragedians (and the reader) would be better served to ignore the Stratford dramatist altogether and focus instead on:

the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

And the subject of these lines—the English author who rose from the ashes of a “comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth” is not hard to determine.

Jonson chose his words carefully—carefully enough that his reference to North’s Plutarch’s Lives is unmistakable—or as its actual title reads: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED …” Not surprisingly, the signature feature of North’s translation is that it is not just a collection of biographies; rather its extremely peculiarizing feature is that Plutarch is writing “COMPARISONS” of Greek leaders with Roman ones. Each section of the book contains three chapters—a biography of a Greek, a biography of a Roman, and a chapter examining correspondences between the two.

All of the titles of these third-chapters in the section followed the same format: “The COMPARISON of [Greek] with [Roman]” – with “COMPARISON” in all-caps. For example, “THE COMPARISON OF Alcibiades with Martius Coriolanus.”

Moreover, Jonson, with his specific description of “insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” even appears to be hinting at the parallels between Alcibiades and Coriolanus as they are the lead characters of two parallel tragedies—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—in the very Folio he is introducing. As shown in the following passages, according to North’s translation, the Greek Alcibiades, one of the main characters of Timon of Athens, was known for his “insolence,” while the Roman Coriolanus was known as “haughty.”

Howbeit in Alcibiades there was nothing, but his insolency and vainglory that men misliked.20

This Timon was a citizen of ATHENS, that lived about the war of PELOPONNESUS, as appeareth by Plato, and Aristophanes comedies: in the which they mocked him, calling him a viper, & malicious man unto mankind, to shun all other men’s companies, but the company of young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly feast.

This latter passage, referring to Timon’s great feasts and his relationship with Alcibiades, describes the main focus of Timon of Athens and again describes Alcibiades as an insolent Greek. And this is how he is portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, while the Greek warrior was known for his insolence, his Roman counterpart was a paragon of haughtiness. North’s translation of the story of Coriolanus emphasizes “the austerity of his nature, and his haughty obstinate mind.” More, all editions of the Roman tragedy mention his pride, condescension, and aloofness, with many editors describing Coriolanus as “haughty.” In fact, examples are so numerous that specific citations are pointless. A Google Book search for the phrase, “haughty Coriolanus,” yields more than 150 results. And it’s likely that the vast majority of all editions of the Roman tragedy describe him thusly.

Jonson’s remark in the front of a Folio that contains four tragedies based on Thomas North’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED” including two parallel plays that invite comparisons between the “insolent” Greek Alcibiades and the “haughty” Roman Coriolanus is not a coincidence. Rather, Jonson is not only exposing the author behind the Folio but emphasizing the intricate entanglement among North’s plays and his translations.

I found the evidence for North’s authorship to be entirely convincing even before this. The textual similarities indicated by the plagiarism analysis is simply too strong to deny. Nor do I find it remotely troubling to accept that this means that the sonnets were written by someone else; they never struck me as having been authored by the same individual and I wondered about that even back in high school.

But this evidence from the First Folio would, in itself, be sufficient. And it’s truly amazing that no one else ever clocked it.

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